Recently I came across a big MongoDB database which needed pagination. But it was surprising how getting to page number 2000 ended up in a timeout. A quick research led me to MongoDB documentation:

The cursor.skip() method is often expensive because it requires the server to walk from the beginning of the collection or index to get the offset or skip position before beginning to return results. As the offset (e.g. pageNumber above) increases, cursor.skip() will become slower and more CPU intensive. With larger collections, cursor.skip() may become IO bound.

So “skip” clearly won’t work for a big set which led to the sort and gt solution.

Sorting and $gt:

Simply sorting by a created_at field then continuing from the last known created_at date by finding the next set would solve the problem.